Category Archives: Drama

SIFF 2014: Bad Hair **1/2

September 20, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Hullabaloo on May 17, 2014)

This naturalistic drama from Venezuelan writer-director Mariana Rondon concerns a 9 year-old named Junior (Samuel Lange Zambrano) who lives in the rough-and-tumble tower blocks of Caracas with his mother Marta (Samantha Castillo) and baby brother. Impoverished and recently widowed, Marta scrapes out a meager living cleaning rich people’s homes. She desperately wants her old job back as a security guard, but her sleazebag ex-supervisor will help her get reinstated only if she agrees to sleep with him. Adding to her stress, Junior is becoming obsessed with his hair; he wants it straightened, to emulate his favorite pop singer. Most worrisome to Marta, he’s showing an “unmanly” interest in singing and dancing. The increasing tension between mother and son is about to boil over. Using equal parts character study and kitchen sink drama, Rondon metes out subtle social commentary about slum life, class struggle and machismo in Latin culture.

Culture Clash, Drama, Gangsters

SIFF 2014: White Shadow ***

September 19, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Hullabaloo on May 17, 2014)

Israeli director Noaz Deshe’s impressive, strikingly photographed debut is a character/cultural study about the travails of a young albino Tanzanian. There’s also a “ripped from the headlines” element; According to a 2013 U.N. report on human rights, there has been an escalation of horrifying attacks on albinos in Tanzania, because (there’s no delicate way to put this) their organs and body parts have become a high-demand commodity for witch doctors (who use them in rituals and potions). Such is the possible fate for Alias (Hamisi Bazili), sent by his mother to live with his uncle (James Gayo) after witnessing his father’s brutal murder. As if it wasn’t tough enough for bush-dwelling Alias to adjust to life in the big city, his uncle is in debt to gangsters. The subtext recalls Peter Weir’s The Last Wave; a modernized indigenous society struggling to shake off archaic superstitions without losing their sense of cultural identity.

Drama, Religion, War

Seattle Jewish Film Festival 2014: Aftermath ***

September 17, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on February 22, 2014)

This intense drama from writer-director Wladyslaw Pasikowski (which reminded me of the 1990 West German film, The Nasty Girl) concerns a Polish émigré (Ireneusz Czop) who makes a visit from the U.S. to his hometown for the first time in decades to attempt a reconciliation with his estranged brother (Maciej Stuhr). He quickly gleans that his brother (whose wife has recently left him) has become a pariah to neighboring farmers and many locals in the nearby village. After some reluctance, his brother shows him why: he’s been obsessively digging out head stones from local roads that were originally re-appropriated from a Jewish graveyard during WW2, converting his wheat field into a makeshift cemetery. Oddly, he’s also learning Hebrew (the brothers are non-Jews). Not unlike the protagonist in Field of Dreams, he can offer no rational explanation; “something” is compelling him to do it. It seems he’s also dredging up shameful memories among the village elders that they would prefer not to process. It is a powerfully acted treatise on secrets, lies…and collective guilt.

Adventure, Culture Clash, Documentary, Drama

Blu-ray reissue: Herzog: The Collection ****

September 17, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on August 9, 2014)

Herzog: the Collection – Shout! Factory Blu-ray (box set)

(*sigh*) It turns out everything that I thought I knew about iconoclastic German director Werner Herzog’s oeuvre couldn’t fill a flea’s codpiece (hangs head in shame, while sheepishly offering to rip up critic’s license for the reader’s amusement). I came to this realization after perusing the list of films included in Shout! Factory’s handsomely designed new Blu-ray box set. Out of the 16 films (spanning the years 1970 to 1999), I had only seen 5. However, in my defense, this is the first time any of these films have been available on Blu-ray, and a good number of them (particularly from the 1970s) have been difficult to track down in any format since the advent of home video.

As I have been plowing through this eclectic collection, I can confirm one constant that I had already gleaned about Herzog…from his earliest days as a filmmaker and continuing to this day, he goes to places where most of us fear to tread (literally and figuratively) and hones his lens in on the one thing in the room that makes us want to look away (how does he always know?!) With beautifully restored prints, new audio commentaries, and many more extras, this box set is a film lover’s dream.

Drama, Neo-Noir, School Days

Hints and allegations: The Hunt ***1/2

September 16, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on August 9, 2014)

Did you ever play “telephone” when you were a kid? Assuming that some readers were raised on texting, it is a party game/psychology 101 exercise in which one person whispers a message to another, moving down the line until it reaches the last player, who then repeats it loud enough for all to hear.

More often than not, the original context gets lost in translation once it runs through the gauntlet of misinterpretations, preconceptions and assumptions that generally fall under the umbrella of “human nature”.

The Hunt is a shattering drama from Danish director Thomas Vinterberg (co-written by Tobias Lindholm) that vividly demonstrates the singularly destructive power of “assumption”.

When we first meet bespectacled, mild-mannered kindergarten teacher Lucas (Mads Mikkelsen), he is just beginning to see the light at the end of the tunnel following a difficult and emotionally draining divorce. Well-liked by his students and fellow teachers and bolstered by the support of long-time friends like Theo (Thomas Bo Larsen) Lucas is picking up the pieces and embarking on a fresh start. He lives and works in a small, tightly-knit community, where few residents would be considered “strangers”

One day at school, some of Lucas’ students decide to “dog pile” their teacher. Watching from the wings is Theo’s daughter Klara (Annika Wedderkopp), a withdrawn but sweet little girl who knows Lucas not only as a teacher, but as a family friend. She joins the giggly pile of kids and kisses Lucas, full on the lips. He immediately takes Klara aside and gently admonishes her, explaining that it is inappropriate for her to kiss any adult on the lips (other than Mom and Dad).

But 5 year old Klara is only puzzled and hurt by what she simply perceives as rejection. A while later, the school principal (Susse Wold) spots a tearful Klara. She asks her what is wrong. Klara’s answer is a sulking child’s innocent lie, but it ignites a real life game of “telephone” that is about to turn a man’s life upside down.

Mikkelsen’s performance as a man struggling to keep his head above water whilst being inexorably pulled into a maelstrom of Kafkaesque travails is nothing short of astonishing. The film is a fascinating glimpse into the psychology of mob mentality, at times recalling Fritz Lang’s Fury. There are also flashes of Akira Kurosawa’s Scandal, particularly in the protagonist’s dogged refusal to dignify the accusations by neither denying guilt nor going out of his way to profess his innocence.

The Hunt is powerful and unsettling, yet essential. And that’s no lie.

Drama, Mystery, Thriller

Highway 61 revisited: Mud ***1/2

September 15, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 27, 2013)

There’s a lot of mystery in Mud, writer-director Jeff Nichols’ modern-day Tom and Huck adventure-cum-swamp noir…not the least of which is how a 14 year-old Arkansas river rat named Neckbone came to be in possession of a Fugazi t-shirt (these are the little throwaway details in movies that keep me up nights-I’m pretty sure I need medication). However, that isn’t the central mystery; this tale is chuck-full of characters with Dark Secrets murkier than the black waters of the Mississippi that burble and roil throughout it.

The aforementioned Neckbone (Jacob Lofland) plays second fiddle to our young protagonist Ellis (Tye Sheridan). Ellis and Neckbone, who grew up together in a clannish riverbank neighborhood, kill time exploring their environs in a motorboat. While scouting a tiny island in the middle of the Mississippi, they happen upon a boat that has been stranded high up in a tree (now there’s a mystery).

Assuming that the wreck is abandoned (and being 14 year-old boys) they declare dubsies and agree to keep it a secret between the two of them. However, further exploration reveals dismaying evidence that “someone” may already have laid claim to this one-of-a-kind tree house. When they return to their own boat, fresh footprints indicate that while they were up in the tree, “someone” else was also doing some recon. Enter “Mud” (Matthew McConaughey).

Although somewhat gaunt and feral in appearance, Mud turns out to be disarmingly laid-back and soft-spoken in countenance. He is also quite the raconteur, soon regaling the impressionable lads with his tale of woe. While it may appear that he’s been living by his wits on this veritable desert island for an indeterminate amount of time, it seems that he has but recently returned to the area with a Special Purpose: to reunite with his long-time ladylove, Juniper (Reese Witherspoon).

So why doesn’t he simply make the 20-minute boat ride into town and hook up with her? Well, there’s this slight hiccup. You see, since they were last together, Juniper left him for this other guy, who turned out to be an evil, physically abusive dirt bag. So Mud ended up sort of, well, killing him. And now, the guy’s congenitally felonious family (headed by veteran hillbilly heavy Joe Don Baker) is hot on his trail and gunning for vengeance. So Mud has to lay low. Despite the preponderance of red flags, Ellis and Neckbone offer to help Mud in his righteous quest.

What ensues is a hybrid of Stand by Me and Whistle Down the Wind, with a touch of Tennessee Williams (the presence of a startlingly grizzled Sam Shepard lends additional Southern Gothic cred). I also got the feeling that Nichols was striving to create a sort of mythic American folk tale, in the mold of Glen Pitre’s woefully underrated 1986 gem Belizaire the Cajun; particularly in the way he immerses you in a unique regional subculture, which in this case appears to have changed little since the days of Mark Twain.

While the director’s reach may exceed his grasp at times (due in part to his busy mishmash of character study, family melodrama, coming-of-age tale, love story, mythic folk tale and suspense thriller), the strong sense of place (Adam Stone’s cinematography artfully captures the sultry atmosphere of a torpid backwater), compelling music score (by David Wingo) and excellent performances add up to a perfect Sunday matinee movie.

Drama, Mystery, Sci-Fi

Walden pondering: Upstream Color ***

September 15, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 20, 2013)

You know all those Weekly World News-type stories about people allegedly kidnapped by aliens, who perform horrible experiments on their hapless captives before returning them to their original upright position behind the wheel of their car, now mysteriously relocated in the middle of a cornfield somewhere in Iowa? While they may have vague recollections regarding anal probes and such, these folks are generally a bit fuzzy on details. In Upstream Color, writer-director-actor Shane Carruth may be offering an explanation. At least that’s one explanation that I can offer for this fuzzy cipher.

To say this film is a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma is understatement. To say that it redefines the meaning of “Huh?!” may be more apt. A woman (Amy Seimitz) is jumped in an alley, tasered and then forced to ingest a creepy-crawly whatsit (all I know is that it appears to be in its larval stage) that puts her into a docile and suggestible state.

Her kidnapper however turns out to be not so much Buffalo Bill, but more Terence McKenna (I believe the original working title of this film was When Ethnobotanists Attack!) As he methodically cleans out her financial assets over a period of several days (with her “willing” cooperation) while encamped at her house, he next directs her to commit passages of Thoreau’s writings to memory (it was either that or waterboarding).

What happens next is…well, what happens next is, erm…OK we’ll just say it’s the creepy, fuzzily recollected part involving anal probes and such. All I know is that it takes place at a pig farm and fuzzily reminded me of that really creepy part of O Lucky Man! where Malcolm McDowell inadvertently stumbles into a top secret government medical research lab, where he’s tortured and then the next thing he knows he’s coming to on a gurney next to some poor wretched creature that appears to be half man and half sheep.

Anyhoo, the next thing the woman knows, she’s back behind the wheel of her car, parked alongside some cornfield off the interstate, and spends the rest of the movie slowly retrieving memories of her bizarre experience in bits and pieces. Oh, and along the way she meets and falls in love with this sullen dude (played by Carruth) who may have had the same exact experience! Wild and woolly metaphysical/transcendentalist hi-jinks ensue.

While I will give Carruth some points for originality (the closest I can come to a tagline for this one is A Man and a Woman meets Eraserhead) and find it admirable that he is making such an earnest effort to be compared to Andrei Tarkovsky, unfortunately he’s falling short, just this side of a glorified Twilight Zone episode.

This seems to be the latest entry in a burgeoning sub-genre that I have dubbed “emo sci-fi” (alongside the likes of Another Earth and Safety Not Guaranteed). That being said, if you are predisposed toward such challenging fare, I wouldn’t dissuade you from checking it out. And don’t feel bad if you don’t “get it” the first time you see it. I didn’t get it the second time I saw it, either.

Cop on the Edge, Drama, Family Issues, Neo-Noir

Schenectady, NY: The Place Beyond the Pines ***

September 14, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on April 6, 2013)

It’s official. Ryan Gosling is the McQueen of his generation. He has already aced the Taciturn Pro Driver (in the 2011 film Drive) and now with this weekend’s opening of Derek Cianfrance’s The Place Beyond the Pines, Gosling can add the Taciturn Pro Biker to his Steve cred.

Judging from the chorus of dreamy sighs that spontaneously erupted all about the auditorium when Gosling first appeared onscreen, perhaps “taciturn, ripped and tattooed” would be a more apt description of Luke Glanton, a carny who makes his living charging around the ‘cage of death’ on his motorcycle. When we meet him, the carnival is nearing the end of a run in Schenectady. Killing time between performances, Luke runs into Romina (Eva Mendes) a woman he had a fling with the previous time the carnival blew through town.

Romina is reticent to re-connect with the flighty Luke, for two major reasons: 1) The new man in her life (Mahershala Ali), and 2) A 1-year old bundle of joy named Jason that resulted from their fling. She doesn’t tell Luke about item #2, but he soon finds out anyway.

Now, Luke is determined to “do the right thing” and provide for his son. He promptly quits the carnival gig, accepts a job offer from a shady auto repair shop owner (Ben Mendelsohn) and sets about ingratiating himself back into Romina’s life (choosing to ignore that whole live-in boyfriend thing).

However, minimum wage isn’t fitting in with Luke’s timetable. In lieu of a raise, his boss helpfully suggests that he try robbing a few banks for supplemental income (a sideline that the auto shop owner himself has dabbled in on occasion). With his special skill sets, Luke discovers that he has a knack; soon earning himself a nickname in the local media as “The Moto-Bandit”.

Luke’s reckless approach to his newfound criminal career puts him on a karmic path with that of another young father with an infant son, a rookie cop named Avery Cross (Bradley Cooper), and it is at this point that the film takes some unexpected turns. Without giving much away, we’ll just say Luke’s story is prologue for what evolves into a more sprawling, multi-generational tale in the Rich Man, Poor Man vein.

It can also be viewed as a three-part character study, with Officer Cross’s story taking up the middle third, culminating with a flash-forward 15 years down the road involving a tenuous relationship that develops between the now high-school-aged sons of the two men (Dane DeHaan as the older Jason and Emory Cohen as AJ Cross). There’s also a noirish subplot with echoes of James Mangold’s Cop Land; in fact one of its stars, Ray Liotta, is essentially reprising the same character he played there in Cianfrance’s film.

While it’s tempting to label Cianfrance’s screenplay (co-written with Ben Coccio and Darius Marder) as too sprawling at times (tossing everything into the mix…from classic film noir cycle tropes to Sirkian subtexts) he earns bonus points for coaxing uniformly excellent performances from the cast (particularly from Gosling, Cooper and the Brando-esque young Cohen), and for keeping true to its central themes: family legacies, the sins of the fathers, and the never-changing machinations of small town American politics.

Drama

In the pines: Therese *1/2

September 6, 2015 Dennis Hartley Leave a comment

By Dennis Hartley

(Originally posted on Digby’s Hullabaloo on September 7, 2013)

First comes love, and then comes marriage. Or does it always necessarily occur in that order? For example, according to Wikipedia, a “marriage of convenience” is defined to be

…contracted for reasons other than the reasons of relationship, family or love…such a marriage is orchestrated for personal gain or some other sort of strategic purpose.

“I’m marrying you for your pines…I’m not ashamed of that…you love my pines, too. Only natural.” That’s our eponymous Therese (Audrey Tautou) pitching woo to her fiancé, Bernard (Gilles Lellouche).

Not the most romantic basis for a pending marriage, but apparently it was the neighborly thing to do for those living on adjoining estates in the bucolic pinewoods of southwest France in 1928. “So many ideas in your head,” Bernard teases, “…like everyone, a few wrong ideas.” To which she enigmatically retorts, “It’s up to you to destroy them.” Well, you know what they say…love is a many-splintered thing.

Thus Therese embarks (no pun intended) on a new life, replete with those free-spirited “ideas” in her head. If the prospect of a provincial marriage to a narcissistic dullard who cares more about preserving family cachet than attending to his wife’s happiness or respecting her opinions sounds depressing, you would be correct.

One of the “ideas” that married life cannot “destroy” concerns Therese’s feelings toward sister-in-law Anne (Anais Demoustier), with whom she has been friends since childhood (the prologue offers a montage of idyllic summers suggesting Therese may harbor unrequited feelings for Anne).

This could explain why Therese sabotages Anne’s passion for a hunky suitor and then begins her own downward slide into a permanent sulk over her unsatisfying marriage. Eventually, she can only see one way out. Certain plot elements recall Hitchcock’s Rebecca, yet the film conveys no sense of Hitchockian suspense.

Therese is the final work by director Claude Miller (The Accompanist, Alias Betty), who died in April of 2012 at age 70. Miller co-adapted with Natalie Carter from Francois Mauriac’s 1927 novel, Therese Desqueyroux (previously filmed by Georges Franju in 1962). The novel was inspired in part by the trial of one Madame Canaby, who was tried in Bordeaux back in 1906 for attempting to poison her husband (she was acquitted, but convicted on a lesser charge of forging prescriptions).

The romanticist in me desperately wishes I could pronounce the director’s swan song as a fine piece of work, but unfortunately this film is as dull and lifeless as Therese and Bernard’s doomed marriage. The locale is lovely, the cast gives it their best shot, but the film is undermined by one too many dangling narrative threads…leaving the viewer unable to see the forest for the trees.